Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Five of my poems were recently featured in the online journal Escape into Life.

The poems are somewhat different from those I normally write. If you've been coming to this blog for a while, you know I often write about my parents and their experiences in Nazi Germany as slave laborers.

Often when I do a poetry reading, people ask me if I ever write poems that aren't about my parents.

I do.

The Escape into Life poems -- with the exception of "Life Story" which is about life in the refugee camps after the war -- aren't about my parents.

Escape into Life is a great site, and my poems are accompanied by 5 wonderful paintings by the artist Margarita Georgiadis.

Monday, June 23, 2014

I just turned 66 and last night I got a birthday note from my sister. She wanted to know about my health, so I told her about the arthritis in my shoulder and knees, the swelling in my ankles that I get more and more often, the odd sensitivity in my teeth, those sorts of minor problems.

Afterwards, I thought about our mother.

She dragged herself through two cancers, chemo, a mastectomy, several strokes, near blindness, major heart trouble, and more and more.

She never gave up hope, however. Even when she had the final stroke that left her almost completely paralyzed, she still made it clear to me that she wanted to live, that she didn't want the doctors to allow her to die without a struggle.

I hope I go out the same way: Hoping -- like her -- even when I don't believe in hope.

Here's an old poem about my mom and her hope:

MY MOTHER'S OPTIMISM

When she was seventy-eight years old
and the angel of death called to her
and told her the vaginal bleeding
that had been starting and stopping
like a crazy menopausal period
was ovarian cancer, she said to him,
“Listen Doctor, I don’t have to tell you
your job. If it’s cancer it’s cancer.
If you got to cut it out, you got to.”

After surgery, in the convalescent home
among the old men crying for their mothers,
and the silent roommates waiting for death
she called me over to see her wound,
stapled and stitched, fourteen raw inches
from below her breasts to below her navel.
And when I said, “Mom, I don’t want to see it,”
she said, “Johnny, don't be such a baby.”

Six months later, at the end of her chemo,
my mother knows why the old men cry.
A few wiry strands of hair on head,
her hands so weak she couldn’t hold a cup,
her legs swollen and blotched with blue lesions,
she says, “I’ll get better. After his chemo,
Pauline’s second husband had ten more years.
He was playing golf and breaking down doors
when he died of a heart attack at ninety.”

Then my mom’s eyes lock on mine, and she says,
“You know, optimism is a crazy man’s mother.”

Friday, June 6, 2014

Today, June 6, is the anniversary of the Allied invasion of Europe. It's a day that means a lot to me. My parents were two of the 15 million or so people who were swept up by the Nazis and taken to Germany to be slave laborers. My mom spent more than two years in forced labor camps, and my dad spent four years in Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Like almost every other Pole living in Europe at that time, they both lost family in the war. My mom's mom, sister and infant niece were killed by the Germans when they came to her village. Later, two of her aunts died with their husbands in Auschwitz. After the war both my parents lived in refugee camps for six years before they were allowed to come to the US. My sister and I were born in those refugee camps. June 6, 1944 was the day that long process of liberation for all of us began.

I've written a lot about my parents and their experiences, and here are two poems from my book Lightning and Ashes about those experiences. The first poem is about what the war taught my mother; the second is about the spring day in 1945 when the Americans liberated my dad and the camp he was in:

What the War Taught Her

My mother learned that sex is bad,

Men are worthless, it is always cold

And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid

With your hands you will not survive

The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive

The camps. The old are left in piles

Like worthless paper, and babies

Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place

Where no birds sing, and even angels

Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don't pray

Your enemies will not torment you.

You only pray that they will not kill you.

In the Spring the War Ended

For a long time the war was not in the camps.My father worked in the fields and listenedto the wind moving the grain, or a guard shouting a command far off, or a man dying.

But in the fall, my father heard the rumbling whisper of American planes, so high, like angels, cutting through the sky, a thunder even God in Heaven would have to listen to.

At last, one day he knew the war was there.In the door of the barracks stood a soldier, an American, short like a boy and frightened, and my father marveled at the miracle of his youth

and took his hands and embraced him and told him he loved him and his mother and father,and he would pray for all his children and even forgive him the sin of taking so long.

_______________________________

The boy soldier in the liberation poem is in part modeled after Michael Calendrillo, my wife's uncle. He was one of the first American soldiers to help liberate a camp. His testimony about what he saw in the camps was filmed for a documentary called Nightmare's End: The Liberation of the Camps. You can see a youtube of him talking about what he saw in that camp by clicking here. Here's a link to a presentation I gave at St. Francis College about my parents and their experiences in World War II: Just click here.

My daughter Lillian sent me the following link to color photos from before and after D-Day from Life Magazine. The photos are amazing, and a large part of that amazement comes from the color. The color gives me a shock, a good one--it takes away the distance, makes the photos and the people and places in them immediate in a profound way.

About Me

I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices.
These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember.
Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Lightning and Ashes (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald (Finishing Line Press).